


Recollections

by wanderingempress



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-30
Updated: 2014-11-30
Packaged: 2018-02-27 12:52:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2693693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderingempress/pseuds/wanderingempress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-35. When you walked in, her outrage was a minor quirk, a tiny perturbation in a world that had long been your uncontested domain. You didn’t know then that your world would narrow so swiftly to her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Recollections

When you walked in, her outrage was a minor quirk, a tiny perturbation in a world that had long been your uncontested domain. You didn’t know then that your world would narrow so swiftly to her.

She was new, you saw, new to almost everything. A missing roommate was a cause for tremendous, drop-everything-and-vlog concern, and it amused you a little. Did she have any idea how many people routinely went missing every day, only to resurface sometime later confessing that they really had just gotten away to avoid their acquaintances or loved ones? She was a fiery sort, reactive in the ways that you had learned not to be over a century ago.

It was a simple task, really: the same rules, the same old lure. You knew how this little game worked, and hey, this one had some fight in her and was wound tight enough that it might even be fun to play this time. If you were going to be dragged into your mother’s affairs again, and you inescapably were, you might as well enjoy it.

She was cute, and even cuter when she was mad. She didn’t like you wearing her roommate’s old clothes and becoming a distractingly well-endowed, pink-clad reminder that the girl was still gone, and you found that you actually weren’t that fond of doing it either. But she had a sweet tooth, which she obeyed with rebellious determination (again with the smallness of her pursuits! But it amused you too, somehow, like watching a child wrestling with all its ineffectual might against a loathed holiday sweater), and which yielded you plenty of goodies to break up the monotony of a sanguine diet. After the failed soy milk counterattack, the exchange was again pleasantly one-sided. But more than seeing nothing where there had once been chocolate, she couldn’t stand the reminders of your presence. The hair in the shower like an undead spider, returning again and again every few days. The inevitable drift of her yellow pillow across the room that said at once, _I was here_ , and, _everything here is mine._

Not that she didn’t try to even this score too, taking it back in a video-recorded huff and ensuring that a gaggle of friends traipsed through on a regular basis even after your study group shrank and ultimately disbanded due to poor attendance. The one that unsubtly mooned over her and loomed over everyone else, the one who saw truth in your eyes and refused to meet them, the one practically attached to that one who stared at you with a gaze that craved a 100x lens. Well, they were as harmless as her, if perhaps less suitable targets to annoy and more annoying to you.

You weren’t sure when it changed, when she became more than the mouse for you to worry while you waited for the new moon. Was it when she told you that you deserved better, not knowing that you were but a dimmer appendage of the bright evil that drew her in? Was it when you told her that she looked like a virgin sacrifice and you were suddenly caught in uneasy limbo between jest and truth? Was it watching her work herself crazy, flinging herself and her friends into the mystery? Was it knowing that, unlike the others, she wouldn’t go gentle into the light, and maybe, just maybe, she had a chance, and so did you?

Maybe it wasn’t one moment, a single shadow that blotted out the sinister sun around which you orbited. Maybe it was when theft and mockery and self-interested discouragement turned to unmentioned borrowing and trying to conjure up that silly smile of hers and warning her away for her own sake. Maybe it was when you heard the nightmares or watched her friends reaching witch-hunt levels of righteousness and gradually you found yourself caring more about the disposition of her beating heart than about the fate of your still one. Maybe it was ceasing to drink straight from the soy milk carton, hiding your secrets behind an air of laziness, or maybe it was myriad other things that slipped beneath your radar: hot chocolate casually offered, stories you hadn’t told anyone before, an impromptu waltz. However it came to be, when you heard yourself offering to plunge into the depths, you knew that you had already taken the plunge that mattered.

Did she know? She seemed to miss quite a lot, initially seeing you as so many had before, governed only by a senseless and domineering thirst, unaware that you served a thirst not your own, that you drew your inhumanity unwillingly from another’s spirit. She lived in a world of stakes and blood and scary, kidnapping evils just like the ones on the evening news except with fangs and near-invincibility. You were the hitch in her plan just as she was in yours, a lurking, unduly sexy menace who remade the world to your own specifications even at the expense of the collegiate experience. But somehow, she infused you with that stubborn heroism and insisted that it was there. And just before she rushed headlong into danger yet again, she insisted that _you knew_.

 

…something was shifting in the air, the unexpected warmth that had come was now leaving, a growing chill was seeding ice in my muscles…

 

But in the heat of battle, in the lightning clash of living and undead, what did you know? How long could you pause to see her, how blurred was her image through the tears? When you looked on your old beloved, and _never again_ flashed through your mind, and you threw yourself in with her as you were sure you should have done more than a century ago, did you know what you meant to Laura, and to us?

 

…the cold, seizing my jaw and distorting my voice, reaching into my heart, tugging sluggish tears from my eyes…

 

Because I still don’t know if you did. I’m trying, Carmilla, I’m trying to make it worth it, trying to show you. There is no poetry that can revive you, even if my voice dies and follows you to wherever you’ve gone. I’m sorry, and I’m sorry to have gone on so long, because I only know what the camera shows, while she has loved you. The more I see, the more I realize that you gave yourself to that false light for the truer one that you once saw in her eyes, and I can only hope that it is not extinguished forever as you were—I, we will bring it back for you. Thank you, for everything. I can never find the words to say what you’ve meant to us, and I can only hope…I can only hope you know.

 

…I felt the rain again. All had gone grey and muted, and I was uncomfortably back in my own skin. I stepped back, my prepared remarks long forgotten, shredded, and sodden at my feet. The rain fell hard on muddy earth and pelted us with inescapable truth. I couldn’t look at the others gathered there with me. I hadn’t meant to say so much, but something had come over me. For a moment, I felt as if I’d been there, as if I remembered it, as if something was speaking through me. But that was silly and self-important, and probably impossible. Going through Laura’s footage with Danny earlier, I’d thought I’d come to know Carmilla. But as I’d neared the end of that strange flood of words, whatever it was had slowly left me. I realized now that I was wrong. I hadn’t.

I finally screwed up my nerve and looked up. Perry and LaFontaine huddled together, but every now and then, Perry’s eyes flitted to each of us in turn, still solicitous. Kirsch stared at the marker so small as to seem hopeful, at the bat wing that rested on top; the pink flower in his hand seemed likely to go the way of my notes. Danny held an umbrella over herself and Laura, an arm around Laura’s shoulders. Laura had remained silent throughout my marathon viewing session and this just-finished outpouring of…whatever it had been.

My heart sank even lower. I had assumed too much. I had intruded on their history. I had somehow made things even worse. “I’m sorry,” I wanted to say, wishing I had something, anything stronger than worn-out apology, but Laura removed her hand from Danny’s waist and turned to me. She approached with shuffling feet and downcast gaze, limp and tired. I couldn’t look at her anymore either. I traced the name on the marker with my eyes instead.

I felt her arms around me, barely tight enough to notice, her hands on my back. She laid her head against my chest. I glanced down at her. The rain had already soaked her hair and clothes. I held her to me just as loosely, and I felt her begin to shiver, or perhaps shake, or perhaps both.

Danny went over to Elsie and began conversing with her in whispers. No one else moved, save for Laura. When the whispers died down, we remained there in that frozen moment, silent creatures of stone standing in the rain, waiting.


End file.
